Common law litigation seeking relief from petrochemical companies for causing climate change has been much touted but little successful.

The insurance industry has been warning of huge coming losses due to climate change, but has not taken aggressive action to force change.

Until now?

In a lawsuit filed in Illinois state court on April 16, 2014, some property insurers sued the City of Chicago and a host of regional and municipal water managers for failure to provide adequate stormwater storage. The class action suit alleges that the plaintiffs’ insureds would not have suffered so much flood damage from a 2013 storm had the defendants exercised better planning and construction to deal with foreseeable storms.

Notably, the plaintiff insurers rely heavily on the 2008 Chicago Climate Action Plan. The plan recognized that climate change would cause increased amounts, durations and intensities of rainfall. Plaintiffs allege that despite the foreseen problem and having had adequate time and opportunity, the defendants failed to make the recommended and necessary improvements, leading to the injuries to the insureds’ properties.

Certainly this suit faces many challenges. Courts are slow to override state and local governments’ complicated budgeting choices. Moreover, courts may be ill-equipped to oversee projects such as Chicago’s Deep Tunnel Project, which was commissioned in the 1970s to address metropolitan flooding, stormwater and sewage. After more than $3 billion so far, itwill not be completed until at least 2029.

Also, query whether such litigation will help or hurt state and local efforts to adapt to climate change. It could deter honest forecasting of what it will take.

Still, this lawsuit could augur a new wave of common law climate change litigation – a category involving well-funded plaintiffs with provable arguments for proximate cause of real damages.

In 2010, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Climate Choices came out with a series of reports on the challenges facing the nation on climate change. One of the reports dealt with adaptation – coping with the impacts of climate change that we cannot, or chose not, to avoid through mitigation. This report considered three possible models for federal-state-local relationships in adaptation. One model entailed a centralized adaptation program, “nested in a body of federal government laws, regulations, and institutions.” A second was a bottoms-up approach, largely self-driven by state and local actors. The third was an “intermediate approach,” in which adaptation decisions are largely decentralized but in which the federal government acts “a catalyst and coordinator” in adaptation policymaking. In true Goldilocks fashion, the NAS panel recommended the intermediate approach as “just right.”

It now looks as if the Obama administration is crediting that intermediate course in its climate adaptation policy – and appropriately so. By contrast to mitigation, adaption presents as a local or regional problem, dealing with climate change effects that vary across regions and localities – wildfires in the west, flooding on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, tornadoes in the Midwest. The law and policy of adaptation therefore should have a strong regional and local orientation.

Beginning in 2009, President Obama has taken a series of steps to get the federal government’s own house in order in understanding and adapting to climate change. [Reference Steve McKinney’s blog posting 11.6.2013] More recently, however, the focus has expanded to include coordination with states, tribes and localities – the decisionmakers on adaptation’s front line. The adaptation portion of the President’s Climate Action Plan announced in June of this year ordered the creation of a task force of state, local, and tribal officials to advise on key actions the federal government can take to help strengthen communities on the ground. (E.g.,“will provide recommendations on removing barriers to resilient investments, modernizing grant and loan programs to better support local efforts, and developing information and tools to better serve communities.”)

On November 1, the President announced the members of the Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience -- governors, mayors and tribal leaders -- and further elaborated its mandate: to make recommendations for steps the federal government can take to facilitate adaptive measures at the point of potential impact and to “otherwise support state, local and tribal preparedness for and resilience to climate change.” Although the task force is set to terminate within 6 months of making its recommendations, it represents a step in the direction of NAS’s collaborative model. Hopefully, it won’t be the last.

There is no alternative. Whatever the causes, pace or impacts of climate change, people, cultures, economies and eco-systems will adapt to climate change as it occurs. What’s in question is where, how much and when adaptation will occur and with what strategic planning, distribution of costs and injury.

To date, the inevitability of adaptation has been over-shadowed by the attention to efforts to prevent global warming. Scary projections of flooded coastal cities and wholesale ecological change have been used more to support campaigns to reduce CO2 emissions than to promote serious planning for ocean rise and changed eco-systems. Adaptation planning has not been the priority and has even seemed a cop-out. But as hopes to prevent or slow climate change are not realized, adaption planning is emerging as a priority.

Indeed, behind the headlines efforts to plan for adaptation are already underway. President Obama’s initial support for cap and trade got the attention. But he also issued an Executive Order establishing a Climate Change Adaptation Task Force that is coordinating very significant federal efforts to gather data and plan for adaptation. Many of those efforts are collected at EPA’s webpage on adaptation. More than a dozen states have commissioned adaptation plans, e.g., the Massachusetts Climate Change Adaptation Report. Some universities have developed programs focused on adaptation planning, e.g., UNC’s Center for Law, Environment, Adaptation and Resources (CLEAR). Insurers and re-insurers, public authorities responsible for long-term infrastructure, and societies of professionals such as engineers and others are putting serious consideration into what adaptation will require over time by way of changed standards for public works and buildings.

These efforts do not yet amount to a broad plan, but are laying the foundations for adaptation planning to seep broadly into capital planning and resource protection efforts across all facets of our economy. Compulsory central planning is probably not a politically acceptable option – but the inevitability and breadth of adaptation efforts mean that millions of decision-makers still will plan for adaptation over time.

American College of Environmental Lawyers, The ACOEL, is a professionalassociation of lawyers distinguished by experience and high standards in the practice of environmental law, ethics, and the development of environmental law.